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Sanjay Shah: Making A Difference One Concert At A Time

Sanjay Shah has seen success throughout his life in the financial world. After attending King’s College in London, Shah went on to work for numerous successful institutions, such as Morgan Stanley, Rabobank and Credit Suisse. Over a 20 year period, Shah worked as a highly regarded banker. Finally, in 2008 he found himself without a job. He started his own company, an investment management, principal trading and brokerage firm. He called it Solo Capital.

Solo Capital quickly expanded to two offices with over 100 employees in Dubai and London. The firm began to run itself and no longer needed his minute by minute attention. Shah needed to find another project to get behind. And he decided on autism. Shah’s son had been diagnosed with autism several years prior and he had actively given to the Autism Research Trust, which supports the Autism Research Center. In order to support autism research, Shah took up an old hobby, concert promotion.

The idea was born after Sanjay Shah received a surprise visit from Snoop Dogg at his Dubai home. Shah had loved promoting concerts during his college days so he called a local promotions company in Dubai and got them to agree to partner with him on a local event so that he could gain experience. This event was more of a trial run and did not include the charity aspect. They rounded up musicians like Joss Stone, Elvis Costello, Aloe Blacc and Xavier Rudd and nearly broke even with about 3,000 people in attendance.

The CEO of Done Events called Shah while they were in the middle of planning the event and mentioned that Prince would be willing to do a private event soon. So Shah took this opportunity to tie in the Charity, Autism Rocks. He got Prince to agree to do a private gig in London and they raised just over 3 million dollars.